Creating Resources for Amazon EFS

Amazon EFS provides elastic, shared file storage that is POSIX-compliant. The file
system you
create supports concurrent read and write access from multiple Amazon EC2 instances
and is accessible
from all of the Availability Zones in the AWS Region where it is created.

You can mount an Amazon EFS file system on EC2 instances in your virtual private cloud
(VPC)
based on Amazon VPC using the Network File System versions 4.0 and 4.1 protocol (NFSv4).
For more
information, see Amazon EFS: How It Works.

As an example, suppose that you have one or more EC2 instances launched in your VPC.
Now you
want to create and use a file system on these instances. Following are the typical
steps you
need to perform to use Amazon EFS file systems in the VPC:

Create an Amazon EFS file system – When creating a file
system, we recommend that you consider using the Name tag because the
Name tag value appears in the console and makes it easier to
identify the file system. You can also add other optional tags to the file system.

Create mount targets for the file system – To
access the file system in your VPC and mount the file system to your Amazon EC2 instance,
you
must create mount targets in the VPC subnets.

Create security groups – Both an Amazon EC2 instance and
a mount target need to have associated security groups. These security groups act
as a
virtual firewall that controls the traffic between them. You can use the security
group you
associated with the mount target to control inbound traffic to your file system by
adding an
inbound rule to the mount target security group that allows access from a specific
EC2
instance. Then, you can mount the file system only on that EC2 instance.

If you are new to Amazon EFS, we recommend that you try the following exercises that
provide a
first-hand, end-to-end experience of using an Amazon EFS file system:

Getting Started – The
Getting Started exercise provides a console-based end-to-end setup in which you create
a
file system, mount it on an EC2 instance, and test the setup. The console takes care
of many
things for you and helps you set up the end-to-end experience quickly.